Scarlet women and red herrings

Julian Barnes is up to his old tricks in a witty biography of a Belle Epoque gynaecologist, says Rupert Christiansen

need to anchor itself in the scholarly apparatus of source notes or bibliography. The result is a delight, albeit one that may occasionally irritate and bewilder the literal-minded reader.

Its connecting thread is the life of the French surgeon Samuel John Pozzi – most familiar today as the dashingly handsome figure, bearded and clad in a long scarlet robe, who dominates a painting by John Singer Sargent that made a great impression on Barnes in a National Portrait Gallery exhibition four years ago. Pozzi emerges to Barnes as “a kind of hero… a highly intelligent, swiftly decisive scientific rationalist”, whose internationalist sympathies implicitly represent a sharp riposte to “Britain’s deluded, masochistic departure from the European Union”.

Born in 1846 of Protestant Italian descent, he was brought up in the Dordogne, the son of a pastor, and made his way to Paris like one of Balzac’s ambitious and starry-eyed jeunes hommes de province. By the 1880s he had become one of the outstanding medical men of his era – a pioneering gynaecologist and surgeon, instituting Joseph Lister’s standards of antiseptic hygiene at a time when the rest of his profession barely bothered to wash their hands before operating. Liberal in his views and a Dreyfusard, he renovated and ran a major hospital in Paris, as well as doing public service as a senator in the Dordogne. Naturally kind and generously willing to help anyone in distress, he was loyal to his friends and earned few enemies.

The Achilles’ heel, at least for his contemporaries, was his reputation as a Lothario, but the facts are hardly sensational. His marriage to a Catholic heiress broke down quickly, the initial cause being the baneful influence of an overweening mother-in-law. The couple nevertheless had four children, born over 14 years, and lived separate but parallel existences in the same house until they divorced after three decades of cohabitation. Pozzi also had also a youthful affair with Sarah Bernhardt (who didn’t?), and remained her physician and friend ever after. Later he kept a publicly acknowledged mistress – a married woman of companionable culture and intelligence who was at his side when he died.

Whatever else he got up to remains rooted solely in scandalous gossip of a kind all too routine in the feverish culture of 19th-century Paris. Catherine, his thoroughly disagreeable and mentally disturbed daughter (mistress of the poet Paul Valéry for eight years), felt unloved by her father and accuses him in her diary of being “a moral wreck”, but otherwise there is “not a single recorded note of female complaint against him”, and no solid evidence of compulsive or exploitative womanising at all.

One might even go further and wonder how much time he had to devote to seduction, given his prodigious professional industry and dedication. In any case, there’s nothing for the MeToo movement to chew on here – in truth, it might do better to commemorate Pozzi as the thoughtful gynaecologist who insisted that during vaginal examinations a lady’s modesty should be considered and eye

THE MAN IN THE RED COAT

It is a teasing catand-mouse affair that sadistically dangles more than it delivers